Warning, spoiler alert! Truly awful movie endings.

I've sat through a lot of awful movies. (not to name names, but Swimfan anyone?) But what bugs me the most is sitting through an amazing, or even decent, movie, only to be mindraped at the end by a truly awful ending.

Examples? 30 Days of Night, American History X, The Life Before Her Eyes, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, Grease 2. (Actually, Grease 2 was a pretty horrible movie to start with, but it's luau-themed ending deserved a dis-honorable mention.)

30 Days of Night:
As far as vampire movies go, this one was actually ok at the beginning. Torched cellphones, mutilated wolves, and thirty days of pitch darkness in the lonely reaches of Alaska? Bring it on. Even when the sickly pale and hollow-eyed things (I had to go on Wikipedia afterwards to find out they were actually supposed to be vampires) burst onto the scene, I was still cruising along (mostly to stare at Josh Hartnett * angels sing *), when the girl ruins everything.

I believe her name's Stella, and she's the estranged wife of Hartnett's character, Eben. She runs like a toad and subsequently gets trapped under a truck, and risks freezing to death. Granted, she does have a little girl with her as well who she's trying to save, but that doesn't give her an excuse to have survived twenty-nine days from the vampires just to get stuck under a truck. Eben, being the good person he is, decides to save her. He injects himself with vampire blood and goes to take out the evil vampires, creating a distraction long enough for Stella and the little girl to stumble their way to the safe house.

The fight scene is ok, with a super-vamped Eben punching a hole through the vampire leader's head (super-vampy-cool), but just when you thought everything was going to be ok, the sun comes up, the remaining vampires run away, and HARTNETT/EBEN disintegrates.

WHAT?

Yeah. He DISINTEGRATES.

I spent two hours of my life just to watch the only reason I even started watching the movie radially cremate. Needless to say, I was not pleased.

American History X:
This was a tough film to watch. Anyone who's seen Fight Club knows that Edward Norton only picks the good roles. In Down in the Valley, he was a pedophile/psychopath. In American History X, he plays a reformed skinhead. We the audience get flashbacks of his white supremacist, Nazi-saluting days, then his present-day jail happenings.

We are shown his crime, his pathetic jail sentence, his falling-in with "neo-Nazis", his falling-out with them, his subsequent rape by them, his healing process (both physically and mentally), and his relationship with the black jailmate who later becomes, his friend. There's a lot more to this gut-searching film, but the basic jist is that Norton is a reformed man when he gets out.

His little brother, on the other hand, has been sucked into Norton's past life. His brother's a blatant skinhead, and he antagonizes a black classmate. Stuff happens, Norton manages to make a dent in his brother's racism, and they both tear down the posters and Hitler flags on the walls of their room.

Everything seems to make a turn for the better. But life doesn't happen that way, and neither does the film. His brother goes to school one day, and is shot by the equally young black classmate.

It's a torturous, very real film. In real life, emotions don't magically go away overnight. People do change, but people also don't. The sad, awful truth was that a lot of the anger and bigotry and racism that these kids felt were passed on from their surroundings. The black student kills because precedents indicate that Norton's brother will. Norton's brother resorts to his life because that's what his older brother, Norton, did. Norton did because of his anger. Grown-up figures in Norton's life abused that anger, and taught him to direct it racially.

There was hope in this film, when Norton emerged from jail anger-free. But life doesn't work that way. The ending of the film reflected it.

Instead of being labeled "a truly awful ending", I think the better appellation would be "a truly real ending to a tough, amazing movie that Cindy's happy-ending-moviegoing self refused to accept."

The Life Before Her Eyes:
I didn't understand this movie at all. I think that it attempted to dramatize the events surrounding a Columbine-like school shooting, but instead of respectfully retelling the tragic event, it cannibalized it. I kept waiting for the ending to clear the confusion up, but it never happened. The ending was more confusing, and I had to Wikipedia it afterwards.

Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back:
Han Solo gets frozen in carbonite. 'nuff said.